Fuzzy K-Means Clustering in Mahout

Fuzzy K-Means is exactly the same algorithm as K-means, which is a popular simple clustering technique. The only difference is, instead of assigning a point exclusively to only one cluster, it can have some sort of fuzziness or overlap between two or more clusters. Following are the key points, describing Fuzzy K-Means:

• Unlike K-Means, which seeks hard cluster, wherein each of the points belongs to one cluster, Fuzzy K-Means seeks the softer clusters for overlapping.
• A single point in a soft cluster can belong to more than one cluster with a certain affinity value towards each of the points.
• The affinity is in proportion with the distance of that point from the cluster centroid.
• Similar to K-Means, Fuzzy K-Means works on the objects that have the distance measure defined and can be represented in the n-dimensional vector space.

Fuzzy K-Means MapReduce Flow

There’s not a lot of difference between the MapReduce flow of K-Means and Fuzzy K-Means. The implementation of both in Mahout is similar.

Following are the essential parameters for the implementation of Fuzzy K-Means:

• You need a Vector data set for input.
• There has to be the RandomSeedGenerator to seed the initial k clusters.
• For distance measure SquaredEuclideanDistanceMeasure is required.
• A large value of convergence threshold, such as –cd 1.0, if the squared value of the distance measure has been used
• A value for maxIterations; the default value is -x 10.
• The coefficient of normalization or the fuzziness factor, with a value greater than -m 1.0

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